When drummer Alan Hicks left his tiny hometown in Australia at the age of 18 to study jazz in New York, his father bought him Quincy Jones’ autobiography at the airport. Hicks recalls, “I read it from front to back on that flight, having no idea what I’d be heading into.”

Among his unpredictable career turns, Hicks switched from music to moviemaking and wound up recruiting Jones as the producer of his feature debut, “Keep On Keepin’ On.” The documentary profiles Hicks’ teacher, 93-year-old jazz trumpeter Clark Terry, who played with Count Basie and Duke Ellington before becoming the first black musician to join Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” orchestra.

“Keep On Keepin’ On” centers on Terry’s struggle with life-threatening diabetes as he bonds with prize pupil Justin Kauflin, a 23-year-old blind pianist. “I didn’t really want to make a movie that was just for music lovers,” says Hicks. “Once this relationship between Clark and Justin started to blossom, I realized we could tell a universal story that everybody could watch and enjoy.”

Terry’s stature as a world-class mentor became evident midway through the five-year shoot, when Jones showed up. Back in 1947, Jones, then a skinny 12-year-old trumpet player, pestered Terry for pointers after a gig. Now the Oscar-winning music producer traveled to Jones’ Arkansas home to reminisce and listen to Kauflin play an impromptu living room concert as cameras rolled.

Hicks remembers, “Quincy walked right into our movie. It’s hard to get even 20 minutes with him, but he stayed eight hours. I figured even if he doesn’t sign a release, I’ll put this footage in an archive because this is jazz history going down.”

Once Jones signed on to produce the movie, he used his clout to secure the rights for 87 pieces of music. Hicks recalls, “I’d spent all those years getting to know Clark’s favorite songs and I put them all into the film: Miles Davis, Ellington — I wasn’t even thinking about music rights.

“Once Quincy assured all these estates that this was a good project, we were able to get all the prices down and I didn’t have to remove any music. When we showed the movie to Clark, he often asked me to stop it so he could finish singing the song.”

Actor-turned-filmmaker Myrton Running Wolf takes on the controversy surrounding the Washington Redskins’ name and mascot in the short documentary film “This Is Not an Indian Problem.”

The movie screens at noon Wednesday at the Metreon in San Franciso as part of the American Indian Film Festival.

Wolf, who is based at Stanford University, says he hopes his film “restores the voice of Native Americans who have been silenced and had their identities appropriated for corporate gain.”

Hollywood’s catching up with Europe when it comes to drone-powered cinematography, after a recent FAA ruling. Tony Carmean runs one of six companies now permitted to operate camera-mounted drones. He says, “The FAA was really concerned about safety and privacy. When you’re talking about a closed set, it’s very tightly controlled, so those two concerns are greatly minimized in film production.”

Drones have been used overseas to film James Bond and Harry Potter movies. Now Carmean expects that some of that work will remain in California. “From a business perspective, the difference in our meetings with studios has been like night and day. It’s gone from 'We’re interested but we cannot talk to you now’ to 'We expect to have plenty of work for you.’”

Flying cameras free filmmakers from relying on cranes, dollies and other restraints, Carmean says. “Since these cameras are not tethered to anything, we can fly through front doors and out the back door of a building, fly around an actor’s head, and we can do it very efficiently.”